by Lynn Haney
Such setbacks triggered Greg’s dark Irish moods. During one funk, he quaffed Jack Daniels and revealed his feelings to Charles Hamblett with uncharacteristic candor. Hamblett was writing a book called The Cage. It was a series of interviews about how Hollywood – the weirdest small town in America – had a way of closing in on movie people and making them feel trapped.
On the day of their meeting, a coastal haze made the Pacific kingdom of Movieland look like a fading dream. Arriving at Greg’s Summit Ridge ranch house in Brentwood, Hamblett was surprised to find an unshaven, sleep-deprived man deep in reflection. As they sat in the garden near the pool looking out at the vertiginous view of sun and sea, Greg knocked back his drink and admitted: ‘There are times when I could cheerfully walk out on the whole God damn setup. I don’t have to make pictures anymore. When I first came out here to work from the New York stage, I was carved up in all directions, a dumb actor tied to a slew of contractual clauses. Today I’m my own man, free, off the hook. This is a collective business, I know. But now it’s up to me to decide the stories we use and the kind of picture in which I’m prepared to get involved. I’m no longer the dumb and trusting ham being shuttled from picture to picture at someone else’s whim. I’m a company boss who has to make big decisions right or wrong, responsible only to myself in the long run.’
Greg shifted his great legs in the canvas chair and continued grousing, sounding to Hamblett like a drugstore cowboy: ‘For years, we actors have been fighting for our so-called artistic freedom. We wanted to get rid of the moguls and their accountants. We damned the studio Shylocks for their materialism and lack of taste. Now, most of us are on our own. So what happens? This morning I had to call my office and scrap a production on which people had been working for months . . . I decided it would be best to chuck it rather than risk making a bad picture. All night I’ve been pacing up and down the house trying to make the right decision. I tell you there are times when I wish Hollywood actors had retained the status of bums and gypsies and left the planning to others. Right now, I’m tempted to say “the hell with all of it.” ’
Greg’s tirade gained stentorian force: ‘The picture has changed, my friend. The old omnipotent caliphs are dying fast. Television plus the weight of years has weakened the survivors. It will need energy and a fresh executive approach to redirect the creative drive, re-channel the talent. The monopolies of the studios have been broken. The anti-trust laws have severed their distribution outlets. The shackling of actors to loaded long-term contracts is virtually a thing of the past. In effect, I have complete control over what I do. A year or two back this was considered some kind of victory of art over tyranny. Now I’m not so sure.’
The more he talked, the more Greg sounded like the guileless young man he was when he first hit town: ‘I’m a free soul, you remember. Before I became an actor, I wanted to be a writer. Freedom of mind and action is important to me. Right now I’d like to take off for Mexico and fish for a while and swim and read books without wondering whether they would make a good picture. Now I’ll have to follow another production through from the drawing board to the cutting room. And then go out on the road and sell it with personal appearances. It can be stimulating. A challenge, as they say at Chasens. But there are times when actors like myself find themselves wishing we could resurrect Thalberg and pass the ball to him or people like him. The town’s wide open for any operator with the ability to finance, package and sell motion pictures.’
Finally, looking over at Hamblett, he sighed: ‘You’re lucky. As a writer, you can go anywhere you like. You carry your studio in your mind’s eye . . . you don’t have to worry about lights and cameras just so long as you have a couple of ballpoints. You guys are fast, mobile. If we’re the heavy artillery, you’re the guerrillas. The guys who can hang out in the hills and harass the enemy with minimum equipment.’
Clearly, Greg needed something to lift his spirits. Fortunately, he was presented with a delectable mood-enhancer in the shape of Sophia Loren. The belle of Naples had signed on to do a picture with him.
Born 31 years before, illegitimate, in a ward for unwed mothers, Loren had gone on to become a rich and talented actress. Commenting on her extraordinary emotional equilibrium, columnist Rex Reed noted: ‘For a woman who has spent most of her life in the headlines, been threatened with excommunication by the Roman Catholic Church, jail sentences by the Italian government, rape by German soldiers, robbery at gunpoint by thugs, scandal and sometimes even death, she remains sane, natural, and unpretentious.’ Still, she was no pushover – as Greg would soon discover.
Producer-director Stanley Donen, whose Charade (1963) with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn had recently been a box-office smash, wanted to team Sophia Loren with Greg and do a similar romantic thriller titled Arabesque (1966). Donen intended to start production in England at the end of April 1965, which suited Loren and Greg. The two stars had discussed the possibility of working together two years before at the Oscars ceremonies.
Cary Grant had been Stanley Donen’s financial partner in several of their movies together, and he was originally supposed to star in Arabesque. But after taking flak from the critics for his love scenes with the considerably younger Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Grant decided that he had grown too old to continue playing romantic leads. He recommended that his close friend Gregory Peck, his junior by 12 years, replace him. (Peck grumbled good-naturedly: ‘Every script I get has Cary Grant’s paw prints on it.’) No doubt Grant also nominated Loren for leading lady. They had become romantically entangled while filming The Pride and The Passion (1957) in Spain. If Loren hadn’t been committed to marry Carlo Ponti and Grant not been already married to Betsy Drake, the relationship might have gone somewhere. In any case, he was still very fond of her, often phoning her long distance just to chat.
Loren would have preferred Cary Grant. Friends of hers claimed Greg had been taking himself too seriously as an actor since winning the Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird. But Loren found him amiable and easy to work with, although his technique lacked the comedic sparkle of Cary Grant.
Arabesque was a contrived, not altogether successful chase melodrama set amid lavish international settings. Instead of the Paris of Charade, Arabesque used London, Oxford, Ascot, and the English countryside for backgrounds. As he did for Charade, Henry Mancini composed the title song and music score. The title Arabesque suggested undulating suspense but also played on the word ‘Arab,’ a major element in the story. At Greg’s suggestion, Donen chose it over Cipher, the title of the Gordon Cotler novel on which the script was loosely based.
Donen later said: ‘It wasn’t a good script and I didn’t want to make it, but Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, whom I loved, wanted to be in it and the studio implored me to make it, because, they said, “It’s ridiculous not to make a film with Peck and Sophia.” ’
Though Greg was no young stud, he proved to be an attractive on-screen love interest for Loren. (He kept in shape by bicycling, swimming, and exercising on a slant board.) At a time in life when many stars see their best features succumb to gravity, Greg was fulfilling a prophecy made in the 1940s. ‘For the camera purpose, his lean, bony face is the sort that is practically indestructible. For the next 20 years, he is not likely to look older, enough to damage him as a leading man.’
Loren had the benefit of an eye-catching wardrobe. Due to the success of Charade, in which Audrey Hepburn made fashion news in Givenchy creations, Donen was able to persuade Universal to spend $100,000 on a wardrobe for Loren at Christian Dior. So before setting down in London for the shooting, Loren stopped in Paris for fittings with Christian Dior’s Mark Bohan, who designed all her outfits for the movie, plus 25 pairs of footwear that went with them.
Loren played the mistress of a murderous Arab tycoon who is plotting to take over the world oil supply, while Greg was cast as an American exchange professor at Oxford University who is trying to decipher a secret message written in hieroglyphics. Arabesque repeated a plot device i
n Charade, where the audience never knew for certain whether the hero was the murderer or not until the climax. In contrast, however, this film had what some saw as an excess of clever plot twists. As the director admitted, ‘I kept my sequences all right, but I ruined the movie.’
One of the lead actors’ first scenes together required the fugitive professor to run and hide in the shower stall occupied by the nude Loren. Since they hardly knew each other, Greg tried to put her at ease. ‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ he told her. ‘It’s all in the game. Strictly professional.’
Loren looked at Greg with those giant almond eyes. ‘What makes you think I would be embarrassed?’ she asked as she slipped out of her robe and into the shower. ‘Absolutely nothing at all,’ Greg replied, as soon as he caught his breath.
Asked about how he felt about the shower scene later, Greg said only that the view was ‘Spectacular!’ Allan Ladd, who played opposite Loren in Boy On a Dolphin (1957) had a more alarmed reaction to coming into such close proximity with the Italian beauty’s famous poitrine: ‘It was like being bombarded with watermelons.’ For her part, Loren liked to say: ‘Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.’ Lest anybody get the wrong idea, she would insist in her broken English: ‘I am not a sexy pot!’
Relations between the principals weren’t always so lighthearted. Later in the film, Loren and Greg were being chased through a cornfield by villains driving a deadly thrashing machine. Since suffering permanent injury during the riding accident incurred just before filming Yellow Sky, Greg struggled with all his might trying to keep up with Loren. Ignoring Greg’s pain, Loren kept getting ahead of him. Finally, he pleaded with her, ‘Sophia, would you please slow down? Remember, I’m supposed to be rescuing you.’ Loren just laughed: ‘Greg, you can do better than that. Just try harder.’ In her drive to look young and vigorous in the film, she even went to Stanley Donen and insisted ‘make him run faster.’ But Greg was in such pain, Loren finally had to cooperate or there would have been no scene.
Greg wanted to grow in new directions. It seemed like everybody he knew was engaged in restless travel and radical politics, in drugs and spiritual quests, or seeking new forms of love and work. Cary Grant was experimenting with LSD and even admitted to dropping acid more than a hundred times; Frank Sinatra recharged himself by taking a very young Mia Farrow for his bride (hearing the news, Ava Gardner howled: ‘I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy’); and numerous other stars were partying with Bunnies at the Playboy mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. Greg didn’t have any great yen to snort cocaine, take off for India with the Maharoonie, or fill his bed with upwardly nubile starlets. Although he was friendly with the Rat Pack, he was not about to sully his White Knight image with heavy boozing and gambling in Vegas. So, while it seemed that half of Hollywood was ‘letting it all hang out’ and looking for exciting new ways to raise hell, Greg went from good – to gooder.
Taking a three-year break from making movies, he devoted the lion’s share of his time to the American Cancer Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He also agreed to act as general chairman of the Motion Picture Relief Fund’s 15-year endowment and building relief campaign. ‘I want to be useful,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to concentrate just on my own career.’
Aside from his heartfelt desire to make the world a better place, Greg had another spur. In a spirit of provocation, Gore Vidal once said to him: ‘C’mon now, don’t you think acting is really a feminine job?’ Incensed, Greg shot back: ‘You mean feminine like Tracy and Cooper and Bogart?’
Actually, Vidal hit a sore spot. Acting has always been considered sissified – as Doc Peck told the young Greg in no uncertain terms. It was not a respectable job for an Alpha male. ‘Scratch an actor and you find an actress,’ claimed Dorothy Parker – who did a lot of scratching. And while Greg evoked the name of his idol Spencer Tracy, that star never thought much of the profession. ‘Why do actors think they’re so God damn important?’ he bellowed. ‘They’re not. Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is.’ Warren Beatty put it another way: ‘Movies are fun, but they’re not a cure for cancer.’
So Greg wanted to step up his humanitarian efforts and make some solid contributions to his country. He had never defended America in war, and acting was just playing at heroism. A movie might show him parachuting behind the lines in Nazi Germany, but the person in the parachute wasn’t even Greg, but a double. Besides, even at his most ambitious, he had never been a taker. As we have seen, a broad streak of idealism was evident since schooldays. Over the years, Greg had devoted, often quietly and without much public notice, a great deal with his time and energy away from the cameras and sound stages and locations to a wide range of charitable and humanitarian activities.
In 1966, he embarked on a personal crusade. Recalling the excruciating last days of his intrepid grandmother, Catherine Ashe, who succumbed to ovarian cancer, as well as those of friends and a more recent experience with his father’s widow, Dorothy Peck, who had pleaded with him ‘You’ve got to get them to let me die. I’m so sick,’ Greg accepted the office of National Chairman of the American Cancer Society. With Veronique, he crisscrossed America on a breathless circuit of 24 cities, and raised $5 million.
Greg’s inadvertent role in aiding the spread of lung cancer went unspoken. Like many of his confreres, he had bolstered his income by posing for cigarette ads – in his case Chesterfields. The ads were backed up by ‘product positioning,’ the ubiquitous flaunting of cigarettes by the characters he portrayed in films such as Gentleman’s Agreement and Twelve O’Clock High. In retrospect, Greg undoubtedly felt great anguish for advertising cigarettes once the link between them and cancer was disclosed in the Surgeon’s General’s report in 1964. Unfortunately, the damage is still being done. With the frequent airings of his movies on television and with video rentals, he is helping to sell tobacco products to a new generation of viewers.
On a sunny day in September 1965, Greg stood only a few feet away from President Lyndon B Johnson in the White House Rose Garden. Johnson had invited him to witness the signing of the Arts and Humanities Act, which made the United States Government, for the first time in history, an official patron of the arts. Novelist John Steinbeck, violinist Isaac Stern, composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Agnes De Mille and Greg were among the founding members of the Arts Council. Other appointees included actress Elizabeth Ashley, sculptor David Smith, and film director George Stevens.
‘It was a very special day for all of us,’ Isaac Stern later wrote. ‘Many of my colleagues were world-renowned artists, others well-known leaders in the arts. Each one had known exciting and moving occasions in their disciplines. But this day was unique, for we were joined together in an extraordinary mission. Our task was to help develop excellence in the arts and to make that excellence more widely available and accessible to all our people.’
Greg also conferred regularly with the newly formed staff of the Endowment for the Arts using his extensive contacts throughout the United States to rally support for the arts. With Veronique at his side, he shuttled back and forth to Washington, becoming a familiar figure in the White House. Lyndon B Johnson vividly recalled Greg’s first appearance in the West Wing offices. His assistants and secretaries, who had remained calmly at their desks during visits of kings, chiefs of state and other dignitaries, practically trampled each other to look at Greg.
Down the street at the Endowment for the Arts, Greg was a favorite with just about everybody. The rank and file troops knew he and Isaac Stern were the standouts on the Council when it came to hard work. An attractive secretary with corn silk blonde hair, wide cheekbones and white Scandinavian complexion became quite smitten with him. She willingly put in long hours typing his correspondence. For her efforts, Greg responded with the utmost gallantry, greeting her with smiles and hugs and sometimes presenting her with bouquets of bright red roses. Watching the kind w
ay he treated the secretary, celebrated architect William Periera, who was also a Council member and knew Greg from the actor’s early days in Los Angeles, shook his head: ‘You know, she looks just like his first wife. Greg will never get over his guilt for leaving Greta.’
Greg served six years on the National Arts Council. One of his first campaigns was to help strengthen the regional theater movement in the United States. With Veronique, he visited theaters in 26 cities. As a result of this scouting expedition, he wrote a report recommending that federal money should be allocated to 16 regional theaters. Among them were the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, the A.C.T., then in Pittsburgh (it is now permanently located in San Francisco), the Arena Stage in Washington and the Boston Theater Company. ‘It was small potatoes,’ said Greg, ‘$10,000 to $15,000 for a theater, but it helped them elevate their standards.’
The standards sorely needed elevating. Andre Gregory, who had served as artistic director of the Theater of the Living Arts, in Philadelphia and the Inner City Repertory Company in Los Angeles, said at the time: ‘I’m scared that the regional theater, by the time it is mature, will have bored the shit out of millions of people all over the country.’
Council members wrestled with the question of how the new funding agency for the arts should deal with film, a task that required some creativity and analyzing what the nation’s needs were when it came to nurturing film as an art form. The Endowment’s role was more obvious in music, where funds could be channeled to symphony orchestras, and in dance, where ballet companies were in need of support. But the highly commercial nature of filmmaking in the United States made the question of govern mental assistance more complex. No area of the arts was closer to Greg’s heart than the establishment of the American Film Institute.